Adult learning is more than alternative education, self-help, self-study, or training. Self-directed inquiry can free you from the cultural traps of today’s postmodern world. When you think for yourself, you take control of your life. Intellectual ability and critical thinking soon become substitutes for paper credentials. Simply stated aggressive learning is the most practical guide to a passionately rewarding life.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

In 1990, Walter Truett
Anderson published Reality Isn’t What It
Used to Be:Theatrical Politics, Ready-To-Wear Religion, Global Myths,
Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World. The subtitle is discerning. Anderson’s stunning
observations offered cultural insight into the new century we were fast approaching
in the same way Alvin Toffler’s Future
Shock had been prescient twenty years earlier.

The 1990s saw the term postmodernism bantered about by people
whose trouble defining it was crucial to its meaning. For many well-educated
people postmodernism seemed to rest on casting doubt on the ability to know anything with any degree of certainty.

Postmodernists pointed
out that language itself evolves from a foundation based on arbitrary
assumptions. The notion resembled eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s
proposition that we do not experience things in themselves but only as
representations of themselves dependent upon the frailties of our cerebral
architecture. The result of such thinking did little but escalate pretense on
one side of the argument and contempt on the other.

Now, in a recent article
titled “Despair, American Style” in TheNew York Times, Paul Krugman has
written about the angst of white people and their difficulty in coping with
life today amid the turmoil of growing cultural diversity and economic uncertainty.
He quotes a source who suggests some Americans are suffering from a loss of
narrative in keeping with their sense of reality. Hold this thought.

A half-century ago,
Richard Hofstadter published his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
In it he said, “At an early date, literature and learning were stigmatized as
the prerogative of useless aristocracies.” But disruptive ideas were all the
rage in the 1960s, prompting Hofstadter to declare in 1964 that we had reached
a point where “anti-intellectualism could be discussed without exaggerated
partisanship.”

Come forward to the
present, and Hofstadter’s assertion sounds absurd. Anti-intellectualism is now
thriving in exaggerated partisanship. What went wrong? The answer in a nutshell
is this: People today are experiencing future shock from the unsettling notion
that reality bears little relation to the narrative that most of us
internalized growing up.

We know now that our
brains don’t work as we’ve always believed they do. Rather, we are rigged for
self-deception, seeing what we want to see, and we are born masters when it
comes to easily tuning out or shielding ourselves from contrary information. And
all the while, our beliefs are setting up like concrete.

Cultures serve as
shelters from reality. Some people adopt worldviews very much like read-only
software, often internalizing a creed so rigidly that they do not hear, see, or
even acknowledge contrary views as having any legitimacy whatsoever. As a
result, a significant number of people seek the refuge of echo chambers and
block out all contrary opinion.

Cultures also serve as
ideological pressure cookers for the formation of beliefs. We are only a few
generations beyond a time when many Americans were determined to fight to the
death in support of slavery. Our cultural traditions remain so deeply rooted
and so tenaciously entrenched that a residue of racial prejudice from the Civil
War is still with us.

In many ways the profuse
ideas of the 1960s represented a backlash to an overly conformist and
authoritarian culture. In the two decades that followed, a strong sea of
resentment for secularism and tolerant ideas led to an increase in opposition
and to the growth of traditional enclaves and think tanks based on religion and
traditionalist ideology. Take this smoldering anxiety globally, and the antics
of terrorists begin to make sense.

It’s hard to get an
objective sense of the cultural differences among the peoples of the world. In
America, most of us grow up with an unrelenting emphasis on and about the ethos
of individualism. This attitude shapes our worldview and the way we relate to
other people.

But consider the ideas we
Americans have about family and morality, and then contrast these feelings with
those of cultures where the custom of honor killing is currently practiced. The
moral gap here is so profound and so wide that people on either side of this
issue cannot fully comprehend the point of view of the other.

Incidents of clashing
social customs and valuesare
increasing today as never before, and the future offers no letup. We’re
experiencing lives mediated by technologies that border on magic. Society is
both ripping apart and coming together at the same time, causing many people to
be driven by fear and a thirst for security.

Alvin Toffler asserted
that there are limits to the amount of change we can endure without
psychological injury. He echoed William James’ observation that “lives based on
having are less free than lives based on doing or on being.” The threat of losing
one’s affluence is bewildering, especially when it happens as technology actually
increases one’s life choices in superficial ways with new gadgets one can
acquire on the way to lower and lower rungs on the economic ladder.

When worldviews unravel,
so does the psyche of individuals. In some cases, the angst generated festers
and results in conflict that leads to violence among people whose worldviews
allow no room for contrary opinion. Although psychologist Steven Pinker has
offered compelling evidence that violence globally is actually diminishing, our
media’s focus on if it bleeds it leads
makes this observation seem hard to believe.

My point is that we have
reached uncharted territory. Our species has always had individuals who see the
same things and reach different conclusions, and for centuries our political
divide has been sharp or even hostile. As Walter Truett Anderson once observed,
the fundamentalists fear the loss of faith while freethinking liberals dread
surrender to those who promise certainty.

In today’s world, communication
technology is effectively retribalizing the world at a pace we aren’t prepared
to deal with. Echo chambers serve as obstacles for finding common ground and as
battle stations on stand-by to detect cultural insults and acts of disrespect.

The more contentious the
ideological divide between academics and average citizens, the more attractive
an anti-intellectual worldview becomes to some. As the rate of change
skyrockets, the felt need to seek simplistic solutions and the shelter of
consensus increases. At the same time, technology israpidly fueling the power of
radicals to retaliate against society at large.

In short, everything that
can happen is happening, only faster, while the disconnect between perception
and reality gets bigger. As a result of this chaos, groups seek refuge in associations
tenuously held together by ancient customs and supernatural beliefs. Out of
desperation more and more of their members assume that those who disagree with
them are evil and double down on their convictions when challenged. Moreover,
when a culture’s sacred beliefs seem so bizarre that outsiders view them as
preposterous, the passion required to defend them is likely to be fierce.

Barring a natural
disaster or global catastrophe, the speed of change is not going to let up. Neither
is seething cultural conflict as worldviews collide and insecure individuals
and groups resist, believing themselves to be facing mortal threats by the mere
existence of those who disagree with them about the nature of reality. People
who express angst because they believe their symbols and icons are being
disrespected are but the first signs of shattering worldviews. ISIS represents the
extreme.

It is in the nature of
human tribalism to assume one’s culture represents the pinnacle of humanity.
When you find out what each culture believes is sacred, you expose a
hypersensitive nerve that, when pinched, prompts fear, anxiety, and acts of
irrationality. When handled with tact, that nerve holds a key to the
radicalization of a group’s members.

If we are going to defuse
some individuals and groups of their fear and achieve a more peaceful society with
fewer acts of terrorism, we need to focus on strategies to help people cope with
disorder without feeling that the escalating change in the world is a personal attack
on their identity and thus their very existence.

If we put a lot of
thought into this enterprise, we could call it education with the caveat that
the way it is presented may be as important as its content. Education has never
been more essential because ideas are the only way to dismantle ideologies.
People who are incapable of creating their own narrative without the need for
hatred as the cultural adhesive to hold their respective associations together
are easy candidates for those who seek to recruit fanatics.

There is one clear and
profound point to be made here which we ignore it at our peril: Violence begets
violence, and if we have any hope of stamping out terrorism, it won’t be with
bullets.